Artistic Attempts
by MizDazey
Summary: How Matt Saracen came to know, and came to love, Julie Taylor. Their love was never a labor; it was bright and warm and it was incredible.


Even now, more than a month into their relationship, he would still never tell Julie this, but she had been the unknowing muse behind his Freshman Honors art project. That year, he'd done a series of charcoal drawings on soft, greyish newsprint, and he'd called it "Girl." "Girl" was a collection of all the parts and pieces Matt liked best about girls, but he told nobody, not even Landry, that actually, he'd really just drawn all the parts and pieces he liked on the _same_ girl, and that actually, she wasn't imaginary.

* * *

For Matt Saracen, the Girl was Julie Taylor. He spent whole class periods just staring at the glints of gold in her sheaf of wheat-blond hair, imagining what colors he might use to capture her hair and her eyes. He sketched her in the corners of his notebooks and textbooks, and sometimes failed to turn in homework assignments, because he'd obliterated the text with his scribbles.

But Julie was too important -too precious- to be relegated to the corners of his notes and his math assignments, so Matt bought a ream of newsprint that was nearly the color of his favorite shirt of hers -it was a faded Panthers t-shirt, and sometimes Matt pretended that he'd given it to her, and that she wore now it to show that she was his. (It was probably one of her dad's old shirts, but Matt pretended it wasn't, because surprisingly, Julie was not actually the scariest Taylor that he knew.)

So he drew the way Julie's lips curled around consonants as she read aloud in their Honors English class; he drew the way her cheeks dimpled when she smiled at her friends; he drew the way her long hair swung behind her as she walked (always) away from him. He drew her stubby-nailed hands and her knobbly ankles and the way her chunky necklaces dipped into the Vs of her shirts. He drew her slouched; he drew her laughing; he drew her shy and nervous and mischievous. He drew her and drew her and drew her.

(And of course, at home, while his Grandma napped or watched game shows with the volume so loud it made the thin walls vibrate, Matt drew more pictures of Julie. He drew the curves of her heavy tits nestled in her cotton sweaters, and he drew the line of her ass as she leaned over her table in the cafeteria. He always laughed angrily at himself whenever he jerked off like some medieval idiot to his goddamn charcoal pictures of her, but their dial-up was way too slow for porn and his dad's scanty collection of _Playboys _just didn't do it for him.)

It was so fucking humiliating to turn in his hastily collected Julie-drawings as his final Art project, but as the deadline approached, Matt just couldn't make his hands draw anything but her. Or, maybe, he simply couldn't make his eyes see anything but her. And when Mr. Andrews picked Matt's stuff to be in the art showcase held each year in the gym, Matt felt like the floor dropped out from underneath his feet. The art teacher was kind of portly and always smelled like bitterness and chalk, and wasn't really like most of the gruff, football-loving men that Matt knew, and Matt hated that he'd never really been able to respect him, because of that. But, whatever- he'd picked Matt's stuff, and he let Matt hang his drawings without any mats, and without his name inscribed on the tiny white cards, so his anonymous "Girl" was immortalized on the walls of the gym by an anonymous boy.

"I know it's obviously not as big of a deal as football, Matt," Mr. Andrews told him as he helped Matt tack up his drawings the night before the show, "but it's a big deal, nonetheless. It's something to be proud of." And Matt _was _proud of it, but he was proud of it all by himself, because who could he tell, exactly? Who would be proud with him?

* * *

He tells his grandma, and she's so proud of him, and bustles around the kitchen that night making his favorite mac-and-cheese, winking over the tops of her glasses at "her Matthew, the artist." But that night, as Matt cleans up the kitchen behind her, he finds that she'd put the milk away in the breadbox and the clean Pyrex into the freezer, and he knows that it doesn't matter; and maybe his grandma was proud of him tonight at dinner, but she'll forget all about it by tomorrow morning. It's not her fault that she forgets, but that doesn't mean it doesn't sting.

He obviously doesn't tell his dad, because Henry Saracen has always yelled at Matt to "quit that scribbling and do your goddamned chores," and he doesn't want to waste even a single line in the emails he can so rarely bring himself to write to his father.

When he tells Landry, Landry blinks slowly at him for a second, then pulls him into a hug, chortling as he pounds Matt's back. "You know, Matt," Landry begins, "I'm all for simplicity and such, but that title? That's got to go, Matt. How about...'Matthew Saracen's Absolute Fantasy Girl'? Haha, I'm sure all of the, the football players would just love that..."

And he doesn't tell his teammates, not that any of them would care that the scrawny, freshman backup QB was in the art show that they were all excused from attending, because, according to Coach Taylor, "football practice was more important than some damn paint-by-numbers thing."

When he stands in Coach's office to tell him that he'll need Tuesday afternoon off from practice, Coach barely lifts his eyes from the spreadsheets on his desk, and suddenly, Matt wants to tell him. And holy shit, he actually has to clamp his teeth around the words as they try to claw their way out of his mouth.

"Hey Coach," he wants to say, and has to dig his nails into the thin skin above his hips to stop himself. "Hey Coach, I need Tuesday off 'cause I'm in the art show, and it's all pictures of your daughter, who I'm pretty sure I'm in love with, and maybe you'd like to come and see it. To see what I can do that's not overshadowed by Jason Street and every other QB the Panthers've ever had."

Instead, of course, he tells Coach that his grandma has a doctor's appointment, and that he has to take her, and that he'll be sure to make it up. Coach nods absently, and Matt backs quickly out of Coach's office, appalled at what he almost said, but a tiny bit furious that he chickened out, in the end.

* * *

The day of the art show Matt wore his best chinos to school, and stole a handful of breath mints from Landry, in case he got up the nerve to talk to anybody about his drawings. That is, if anybody even looked at them. That is, if anybody even came.

The show lasted from the final bell of the day until after dark, to give everyone's parents time to get home from work and over to the school. Matt stalked around the aisles and rickety tables, watching as proud artists talked to their prouder parents, not letting himself imagine how nice it might be to have one of his parents -and he has three, which is more than most people- come to this fucking thing. He watches all these happy family clumps, and he can feel a quiet anger rolling down his spine -fury fusing his jaw shut as he sees yet another thing that he, Matt Saracen, just doesn't get to have. He spins on his heel, back towards the wall that boasts his collection, when he sees her.

Julie is here, wandering slowly past tables arranged with pottery and silver-wire jewelry, smiling at the artists who stand next to their works. She's with Louise, and, as always, Matt takes a second to marvel at parents who would name their daughter 'Louise' in the last years of the 20th century.

He can feel his hands get instantly sweaty, and he wipes them nervously on his pants. He wants to drag her over to his drawings and make her look at them; actually, what he wants to do is to become invisible while someone else drags her over to his drawings, and listen to her talk about them.

So thank God for Louise, who is eager to show off how fucking cultured she is, because she pulls Julie away from the pottery and over to Matt's drawings.

Matt can hear their voices coming towards him, and he wants so fucking badly to talk to Julie, and maybe wrap her up in his arms and bury his face in her hair, but he's afraid he'll stutter or his voice will crack or he'll throw up on her Vans, so instead he ducks behind the styrofoam half-walls that separate his stuff from the girl next to him, and pretends to tie his shoes. He can hear them perfectly, and if he squints around the edge he can see them, albeit less perfectly.

"Jeez, Jules, look at this," Louise says, not bothering to keep the scorn from her voice. "How creepy is this? It's like, so stalker-y."

Matt swallowed harshly, and scrubbed his hands over his face. He wanted to sink into the polished wood floor and never come out. Because, maybe it was super fucking creepy that he'd devoted months to sketching Julie Taylor, when she was in three of his classes and sat directly behind him in two of them, and would have absolutely talked to him, if he wasn't always such a fucking pussy.

But Julie rescued him. "No, 'uise, look, it's beautiful. And it's so good, too. Who did these?" she asked quietly, leaning forward to read the name-tags at the corner of each sketch. Her forehead puckered; maybe she was surprised that someone "so good" would keep it a secret. Because in Julie's world, if you were good at something, you told people about it, and they encouraged you and supported you, and they told you they were so, so proud of you. But that was Julie's world, not Matt's world, because in Matt's world people forgot to be proud of you, or maybe they weren't ever proud of you in the first place. So that's why Matt's name wasn't on his drawings, because he had nobody there to look for it, and to smile at it, and to tell him that he had done good.

Louise snorted. "Ohmygod, _Julie_. How anti-feminist can you be? This is just some lame male fantasy, where all these girls are divided into the bits he likes- it's just parts of a girl, instead of a whole person."

But Julie wasn't listening to Louise. Matt could see her, reaching up to brush her fingers against her own charcoal-ed apple-round cheek. Her lips were pursed, as if she maybe recognized herself in this Girl. Suddenly, she wrenched her hand backwards and blushed, as if she'd suddenly remembered that it was entirely inappropriate to touch somebody else's art.

She turned away from Louise, a secret smile lighting up her face. "No, it's not. It's all the things he notices about her -he knows that she's a whole person, obviously. It's just that these things are magnified, on that day." She peered around the emptying gym, clearly wondering which of their classmates had done this. "It's like, it's like a labor of love. It's incredible."

Matt waited until Julie walked out the double doors to the gym before he uncurled himself from his crouch. Slowly, he reached out and brushed his hand along the picture Julie had nearly touched, wishing he could put his hands on her face in real life, instead of only on the cold, flat newsprint. Carefully, as if he were testing out a new idea, he grinned sheepishly to himself. _"_Actually,_ you're _incredible," he murmured to his Girl.

* * *

He came close to telling her a few times, but he could never figure out the right order of words, so it would sound like the labor of love that she'd imagined it was, and not like the weirdest fucking thing in the entire world. "Muse" was too old-fashioned; "a labor of love" would give away a) that he'd been in love with her for more than a year and b) that he'd eavesdropped on her conversation at the art show; and "inspiration" was too fucking corny. He just couldn't find the right words, so, like he usually did, Matt said nothing.

The last time he almost ever told her was the night after the Mud[toilet]Bowl game, as they walked home together under the streetlamps, both of them soaked through and caked with mud. The mud had dried on his skin and itched unbearably but he refused to let go of her hand to scratch it.

She grinned at him, and he smirked back at her. Theatrically, he rubbed his chest with his elbow, pulling her hand up as he hugged his ribs. "Shit, Jules, you know, yours was the worst hit I took tonight. You're like a Mack truck. We should stick you in some pads, put you on the line to block for me."

She laughed merrily at him. "Hokay, Matty, you're the one who said you want to date a linebacker, not me. Now, if that's really want you want, I won't get in the way of your new romance, or anything." She lifted her eyebrows mischievously. "In fact, I'm sure my dad would love that."

Gently, he peeled a blade of grass off her cheek, marveling, as always, at the fact that suddenly he got to touch the features he'd spent all of freshman year drawing; that he could just reach out and touch her whenever he wanted.

"You did so good tonight, 7," she said softly. "I'm so proud of you, Matt Saracen." She said it easily, as if it wasn't a rare, precious gift. As if it wasn't always, exactly what he needed to hear.

* * *

Once upon a time, he'd sketched all the parts of her that he could see, and all those parts were incredible. He drew her golden skin and her cheekbones and the nape of her neck and her graceful hands, and her tits that he maybe was going to get to touch soon -and she _was_ all those things; things that he'd always known about. Things that he'd always seen. But she was also this: She was proud of him, and she told him so. She wanted him to know that she was serious, so she looked him in the eye and tightened her grip on his hand and let him _feel_ how much she cared about it.

His stupid, scrawny little freshman self had been so right to pick her- to love her. And, he promised himself, that their love would never be a labor. Instead, it would be easy and warm and inviting, and they would lose themselves in it. He would do great thing with this girl and for this girl, because finally, _finally_, she was _his _girl.

* * *

**A/N: Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and I'd love to hear what you think! **


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